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mad agriculture
robots
An "Emotional Robot" Shows How It Feels -- and Is Creepily Convincing
This is a next-generation "emotional robot" named Nexi, who can move its body, hands, and face in a way that suggest human emotion. Created by world-famous roboticist Cynthia Breazeal's group at the MIT Media Lab, Nexi manages to be both weirdly cute and disturbingly emotive. Sure, she "emotes" in a cartoonish way, and yet you won't have any trouble recognizing the feelings she's trying to convey. [Suicide Bots]
satellites
Google Takes Initiative to Find Extraterrestrials by 2012
MIT's teaming up with Google to design the first satellite that can really, truly search the sky for planets similar to Earth in size and terrain, taking us a giant step closer to making contact with extraterrestrials. Google is funding the development of a six high-res, wide-field digital cameras with a 192-megapixel resolution for TESS—the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. That's enough resolution to gauge the brightness of two million stars. MIT scientists are currently hard at work with the design of TESS' observatory. More »
surveillance
You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up.
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The Art of Monitoring New York City's Telephone Conversations
You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up.
More »
neurotic neuroscience
Bad Movies Are Changing the Shape of Your Brain -- Literally
Those Godzilla movies and Mork and Mindy reruns you grew up watching have altered the way you think on a biological level. At least, that's the implication of a controversial new study MIT researchers announced today, which showed that culture changes the way your brain is wired, and how you think about visual problems. In the study, a group of people born in the US were asked to do a visual puzzle in an MRI brain scanner — the results were compared with a group of recent immigrants from East Asia doing the same task. The two groups used very different parts of their brains to do the same thing. More »
Robots Will Be the Perfect Casual Sex Partners
Seth Lloyd, an MIT engineering professor, has published a bracingly sniffy review of David Levy's new book on sex and love between humans and robots. Bottom line: No robot love anytime soon, but get ready for lots of robot sex. [L.A. Times Book Review]
Seth Lloyd, an MIT engineering professor, has published a bracingly sniffy review of David Levy's new book on sex and love between humans and robots. Bottom line: No robot love anytime soon, but get ready for lots of robot sex. [L.A. Times Book Review]
